[tomboy-list] How does the global keyboard shortcut work?

[Hamlet D'Arcy]

Thanks Sandy, this sounds very hopeful.

We are writing an application and we would like to support global key
listeners. The application runs within the Java browser plugin, or
perhaps a full JVM in the future. As a simple example, perhaps the app
is a Contacts Manager, and clicking Super+N should open the New
Contact form even if the app is not in focus. Kind of like how Super+N
opens a new Tomboy note (that is how I configured Tomboy anyway).

Our rough idea today is to install a small program and register an
Ubuntu keyboard shortcut to call the program, and then maybe send a
signal/socket message to the main app running in the background so it
can open the new Contact form. That seems heavy and a bad workaround
to me though. I'll take a look at XKeybinder.cs... if you can
integrate with XGrabKey from C# then you can probably do the same with
Java.

-- 
Hamlet D'Arcy
hamletdrc at gmail.com



On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 10:30 PM, Sandy Armstrong
<sanfordarmstrong at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 11:55 AM, Hamlet D'Arcy <hamletdrc at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am a happy Tomboy user and really like the global Ubuntu keyboard
>> shortcut I can use to create a new note.
>>
>> My question is about how technically the global key listener works. I
>> got the TomBoy source code and see tomboykeybinding.c, but I have no
>> experience with native Ubuntu code, so it isn't much help to me.
>
> It's the XGrabKey part that actually does the keybinding.
>
> If you'd explain a bit more about what you actually want to do, we
> could probably help.  You can certainly use libtomboy in your project;
> it's very popular for other projects to use it when they need to
> perform global keybindings, and it's released under the very liberal
> MIT/X11 license.
>
> You can see an example of its use in managed code by looking at
> Tomboy's XKeybinder.cs.
>
> Sandy
>